The H1Bees Want You: To Rock and Roll

Singing of the Immigrant Experience -- And Life in the Tech Sector

The H1Bees, from left, Alisha Thomas, Kartik Venkataramanan, Srikanth Devarajan and Swathi Raman, are releasing a CD that details what it's like to work at information technology on a visa. (By Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)

The computer programmers arrived in the United States unknown to each other but united in their quest to rock.

On the surface, they were not unlike many others who have left India over the past decade on the H-1B visa, a guest worker program for highly skilled professionals. They wore glasses and mustaches and collared shirts. They could exterminate Y2K bugs and code Java and link Unix.

But as they toiled in cubicles, they dreamed of banging on keyboards of a different sort, of a world where C-sharp is just a musical note, not computer code.

And then their worlds became one.

"H1Bees," an album recorded in a Gaithersburg basement-turned-studio, will be released today, its music a mix of Indian and Western beats with lyrics exploring the high-tech immigrant's experience in the United States. The troupe remains unnamed, giving composer Srikanth Devarajan top billing and referring to the remaining artists as "playback singers," which is customary on many Indian albums.

Yet the computer programmers say their self-produced album would have been impossible in India, where the music industry there is exclusive.

"I was nothing in India," Devarajan said. "Thanks to the H-1, even a small man like me can say I have a studio."

"That's a big deal," nodded Kartik Venkataramanan, a database manager at Verizon who studied Indian classical music as a child and developed an affinity for Jethro Tull somewhere along the way.

Until last year, Devarajan could be described as a most persistent one-man band, using his computing and composing skills to synthesize original scores, dubbing the sound "curry rock."

The overlapping social circles of Indians in the Washington region came to his rescue last year. Out of the blue, he received a random call from friend-of-a-friend Venkataramanan. Venkataramanan's early days on U.S. shores, first Atlanta, then Washington, were spent browsing longingly at Guitar Center until he had saved enough to buy a blue Fender with a Made in the U.S.A. label he fingered as much as its strings.

At last, another computer programmer who wanted to be a rock star. Could there be more out there?

In their first conversation, Venkataramanan invited Devarajan to his housewarming party in Manassas where he promised a gathering of musically inclined folks. There, Devarajan also met Devesh Satyavolu, a multilingual poet, and Srivatsa Srinivasan, who claimed little musical talent of his own but said he always wanted to produce an album and possibly form a production company.